SOME CRITICS OF AUTHORITARIANISM
customs union, and the control of economic life by self-
governing bodies.
The whole system, at least on its political side, is obviously
inspired by that of Switzerland, and in one of his letters
Proudhon exclaims that "if he were only a Swiss, what a
picture he would paint for his fellow-citizens of those so-called
Great Powers whose only greatness to-day consists in the
multiplying of serfdoms, prejudices and destitution."1 But he
was addressing not Swiss citizens but the French people, who
" in spite of the failure of the various systems they had tried
were unable to imagine another."2 Their imaginations were
quite incapable of following these revolutionary schemes.
It was not, indeed, that critics had been wanting of the rigid
centralization from which France had been suffering for several
centuries. But Proudhonist Federalism was not a mere ad-
ministrative reform which might very well have been one day
successful. It attacked the old Jacobin watchword, " La France
une et indivisible "—in other words, the most fundamental
conception of the State.
Federalism was in fact irreconcilable with current conceptions
of nationality, and ultimately of patriotism. Not indeed that
Proudhon was no patriot; the absence of patriotic feeling in a
Frenchman struck him as monstrous. But France was to him
not an abstract entity, to which the people had perpetually to
be sacrificed in some " glorious " war, but the people them-
selves, and the spiritual outlook for which they stood. " France
is wherever her language is spoken, her Revolution followed,
her way of life, her arts, her literature adopted, as are already
her coinage and her weights and measures "3; on the other
hand he would not recognize as his country that " horde of
brigands who shot down in December 1815 those who protested
against tyranny, and raised above patriotic prejudice he would
have offered his sword to Belgium or England." 4 Nationality
is really a narrowing of emotions and mind; in its political
1 Letter, 4th April 1861.
2 Du Principe ftderztif, Book I. (Conclusion).
3 De la Revolution, p. 336.
4 Letter, loth. January 1852.
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